Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/368

Rh be sundered as to the unity of consciousness which contains them; and that if they were so sundered, they would not thereby become individuals. The chasm that is to sunder an individual A from another B may be defined as you please. You may make this chasm a “thing in itself” or a matter of feeling, — an unintelligible presupposition or an object of what you define as a sentiment of “stainless allegiance.” In no whit are you helped by such devices. Chasms do not individuate. Feelings do not need chasms to make them rational. The principle of individuation is not the principle of the sundering or segmentation of contents, whether within a unity of consciousness or as a fact transcendent of such unity. The life of an individual A is individuated, and is kept from being confounded with the life of any other individual B, solely by the truth, if it be a truth, that the life of A, as presented system of contents, fulfils or meets an exclusive interest I, which is such that it declines to admit of more than one system or collection of facts as capable of furnishing it its desired fulfilment; while the life of B similarly meets an exclusive interest I', which is different from the exclusive interest I. That these two interests, or that the contents of these two lives, should be presented as contents to the unity of one experience, and possessed as interests by the Will which in its wholeness individuates the entire system of the world’s contents, does not in any wise militate against the individual distinctions, whatever they are, between A and B. Meanwhile, that these individuals should be not merely numerically different, but free, that is,